Intelligent Assistants for Flexibility Management

The iFLEX project aims at empowering the consumers by making it as easy as possible for them to participate in demand response. A core concept of the project is the iFLEX Assistant, a novel software agent that acts between consumer(s), and their energy systems, various stakeholders and The iFLEX project aims at empowering the consumers by making it as easy as possible for them to participate in demand response. A core concept of the project is the iFLEX Assistant, a novel software agent that acts between consumer(s), and their energy systems, various stakeholders and external systems helping them to achieve mutual benefits through local energy management and DR. The iFLEX Assistants are designed to provide a common approach to enhance user experience, level of automation and personalization in a wide variety of DR and energy services. Because of different requirements of these services, the project provides a common software framework (i.e., iFLEX Framework) for developing application-specific iFLEX Assistants that are customized for the needs of particular service(s). The focus is especially on households and DR for supporting high penetration of renewables. In addition, there is a need for effective incentives and market structures that encourage consumers to invest in these innovative DR solutions. To this end, the iFLEX Assistants are customizable for different incentive and market mechanisms to allow exploitation of the solution in different countries and climatic regions, as well as, to enable A/B testing of different incentive and user engagement mechanisms with real-users. Although the focus is on electricity, the iFLEX project targets to overcome the current silo-approaches and provide holistic energy management that optimizes across various energy vectors. Co-creation with end-users is inherent in different project phases and coordinated by consumer organisation in the consortium. iFlex validation is carried out with field pilots in three climatic regions.